In the monthly hunt for yet more art shows to fill these pages, I find the same names repeated again and again in the email inbox, round robin, like beads on a small bracelet. As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and finding the smooth runner behind all the clatter isn’t easy. I used to know an art dealer whose motto was “I hate lazy artists.” The market was booming at the time, and the point well taken. She might also have said “I hate lazy writers, too,” but I don’t recall for sure. Every now and then, serendipity cheats market expectations, and we get a thrill. I met Claudio Dicochea half a year ago, and with our first conversation—which rollicked, like his life, across myriad borderlands—was surprised I had been ignorant of his work.
Born in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico, and raised in Southern Arizona farmland next to the international border, Claudio Dicochea grew up bilingual. The Mexican comic books El Libro Rojo and Kaliman were his guide to reading Spanish, while his English skills were nurtured by Mad Magazine. His first drawings, naturally, were cartoon stories with characters wheeling about a polyglot countryside.
His painting today continues in a hybrid mode, with Disney characters and Norteño balladeers cohabiting in a Pop-Abstract world of high-low art. Drawing and cartoon transfers are placed on the sheet like collectible toys on a shelf, but don’t confuse these tableaux with facile repetition. Encoded within the play of all- too-familiar stereotypes and candy colors are not only the artist’s childhood memories but a meditation on art’s culpability in the construction of racial classification, a process that ran in tandem with the mixing of peoples after 1492.
According to Dicochea, “Artists after La Conquista made records of the mixing of European, Native and African peoples in the Americas, with shades of light to dark in their children showing the new hybrids—from better to worse, pure to corrupt. This drawing and painting was sent back to Europe as scientific data, very much part of The Enlightenment.” This is a gruesome thought, certainly, and irritating in its strident reminder of racist history. But Dicochea is a trickster, like Coyote, and not unaware of the beneficial effect of a bad example, nor averse to using sleight of hand for shock effect. The Anglo/Latino pairings in his painting may tempt you to fall back on stereotypes of privilege and poverty, but look again carefully—he’s having none of it.
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